Bush, Clinton and other boomers
Part of the whole debate about "who did better on Al Qaeda, Clinton or Bush (pre-9/11)" has revolved around a major national security document produced toward the end of the Clinton administration. Bush defenders have gleefully pointed out that it hardly mentions Al Qaeda, Clinton defenders have said the relevant kind of international terrorism gets plenty of attention, blah blah blah.
Here's something a bit different: a Clinton defender (Matthew Yglesias) admitting that the document shows some typical Clinton flaws:
"A fair criticism to make of this document would be that it has a very Clinton-ish laundry-list quality to it that stands in sharp contrast to Bush's focus -- both at home and abroad -- on a handful of key priorities. That, indeed, was the main criticism one heard from Condoleezza Rice and other Clinton critics from the right during the 2000 campaign. He was too unfocused. The critics were probably right about this. Unfortunately, and as we've seen several times before, when Rice had the chance to draw up her short list of priorities, she left multinational terrorism off it altogether.
"That means terrorism got less attention than it did under Clinton -- a mistake, not only in retrospect, but one that many people saw was mistaken at the time. This is not to say that the Clinton administration was as focused on the issue as, in retrospect, it's clear they should have been. But this, in turn, doesn't mean that Bush didn't take a bad situation and make it even worse."
I'll paraphrase, no doubt a bit unfairly: Clinton was smart, but he had difficulty focussing on a few manageable priorities. (I remember stories about how he would invite an already-exhausted staff to spend one more evening (over pizza or fried chicken) going through some list of policy alternatives--most of which would lead to no action). Bush is ... er, not so smart, but baby can he focus. And if his focussing exercise misses something quite important, he'll never admit it.
One fear I have is that history will record them as two versions of the useless or irritating baby boomer. My larger fear is that younger people won't just sit back and let all these boomers get older and older, and more and more dependent. First there is the cost of health care and other services, combined with waiting in line at stores and elsewhere while the codgers slowly shuffle through. Even more deeply, however, everyone will finally grow sick of the boomers--their music; their claim to have solved all of the world's major problems no later than 1968 (OK, 1972); their fatuous self-absorption. (Did we say we want to think globally and act locally? What we meant is that we want to drive kick-ass gas-guzzling SUVs).
A first step will be a public education campaign to encourage boomers to take up smoking.
If that doesn't work, more drastic action may be necessary.
Update: see Yglesias even more impressively criticizing Clinton: Clinton could and should have done more about the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2000, especially since he was term-limited and had nothing to lose.
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